Tulsi Isn't Going To Be President-- The QuestionIs Whether She Can Be Re-elected To Congress At This Point

Tulsi never seems to have any problems with genocidal fascists

Tulsi Gabbard's presidential campaign is going badly. Did anyone ever expect it to do better? She's a polarizing figure and I always guessed she was running for a cabinet or sub-cabinet position anyone. Her RealClearPolitics national polling average is 1.0. The new YouGov poll from The Economist. Brought more bad news when it was released yesterday. Only 5% of Democrats have a very favorable opinion of her. 23% of Democrats have a somewhat favorable opinion. 28% have an unfavorable opinion and 44% have either never heard of her or don't have enough information to make an assessment. That number goes up even higher among independents. Among Democrats and independents who say they plan to participate in the Democratic primary, only 5% say they would even consider voting for her. And when asked who they would vote for if the primary was today, her number is just 2%.

Could the news get any worse? Oh, yes. None of her colleagues have endorsed her-- no one from Congress and no one from Hawaii, other than her crackpot right-wing, bigoted father. Texas Republican Ron Paul endorsed her, which is a little tricky to use in a Democratic Party primary campaign, and so did filmmaker Oliver Stone and some guy from Russia's Sputnik News. But all that's good news compared to the PPP survey last week of her own congressional district, HI-02, the whole state outside of Honolulu and southern Oahu. Not only do most of her constituents think she should drop out of the presidential race, 50% of Democratic primary voters in the district say they would prefer to vote for someone else, compared to just 38% who say they want to back Tulsi.

Dean Debnam, President of PPP noted that "Hawaii has open primaries and given the hopelessness for Republicans of electing their own candidates to most posts in the state, a lot of conservative leaning voters participate in the Democratic primary because it's their best chance to influence who their elected officials will be. Trump voters are one segment of the Democratic primary electorate that Gabbard is leading-- she gets 26% with them to 15% for Joe Biden with nobody else in double digits." Because she stumbled into backing Bernie in 2016-- part of her war with Debbie Wasserman Schultz-- many progressives on the mainland have always assumed she was a progressive, something Hawaiians find humorous and ignorant. Mainland progressives have started waking up a little as the presidential campaign brought her into clearer focus. The video in this tweet from Monday was enlightening for many since it was clear she was denouncing the impeachment inquiry with Republican Party talking points:

My concern all along has been that impeachment has been something that has been used as a partisan talking point to undo the results of the 2016 election... I think that there certainly have been a lot of voices who've been looking for a reason to impeach Trump because they did not want to impeach the outcome of the 2016 election..."

Who talks that way? Fox News? The Freedom Caucus? The NRC? Trump and Giuliani? Her father?

Right now Elizabeth Warren is leading the presidential contest in Tulsi's district:

Elizabeth Warren- 25%
Status Quo Joe- 22%
Bernie- 13%
Tulsi- 13%
Mayo Pete- 5%
Andrew Yang- 5%
Kamala- 3%
Beto- 1%
Cory Booker-1%

Tulsi's rival for the congressional seat, state Senator Kai Kahele, was in L.A. for meetings yesterday and he popped by for a chat. I asked him a few questions about the issues he's campaigning on. Most of them are also on his official campaign website. Medicare-for-All, for example... he said he's all in and his website? Read it yourself:

Same with the Green New Deal. All in when he sat in my office talking with me about it and all in on his website:

I asked him about gun control. He said he would co-sponsor David Cicilline's sales ban on assault weapons "in a heartbeat." Affordable housing is one of the biggest issues in Hawaii and he starts the conversation by recognizing that "housing is a basic human right." And when I asked him if he backs a $15.00 minimum wage his only hesitation was that he thinks it should be $20/hour.